LOS ANGELES — Ubisoft gathered the gaming media together in a theater in downtown Los Angeles to present its upcoming lineup of software before the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show. We’re attending, and ready to bring you the news. Here’s what’s happening with France’s largest gaming company.
Far Cry 4
Ubisoft kicked off its press conference with a cinematic sequence for its recently announced open-world shooter Far Cry 4. It showed the first five minutes of the game, where the player must take a bus into the foothills of the Himalayas before everything goes wrong. Nearly everyone else on the bus gets shot — and then the villain shows up to welcome you to his world.
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Just Dance 2015
It’s dancing. It’s back. It has Pharell Williams “Happy.” It’ll probably make Ubisoft a lot of money once again. This year, the publisher is highlighting the game’s community features, which will enable players to share their own dances with others.
Just Dance Now
This is the company’s mobile dancing game that enables everyone with a smartphone to join a game of Just Dance. The developer noted that it doesn’t have a limit. If you have a smartphone, 2, 20, or 20,000 can play along, it claimed. To demonstrate this, Ubisoft brought up over 40 dancers to play at the same time. The game even showed which of the dancers, out of the 40, scored the highest and lowest.
The Division
The Division is Ubisoft’s online open-world shooter that takes place in a post-apocalyptic New York. In a new video that it debuted during its event, Ubisoft explained how the world of The Division ended up in disrepair. A plague brought down civilization starting on Black Friday. While society is falling apart, the main theme of The Division is how people can work together to keep each other safe. The trailer revealed a man getting attacked in the streets before another group of friendly people stopped to save him.
The Division is coming in 2015.
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The Crew
Sticking with its trend of putting everything into an open world, The Crew is Ubisoft’s take on the racing genre. It sets itself apart by enabling players to drive from one coast of the United States to the other without having to ever load. You can do this all online with a group of your friends in a crew.
In a new trailer, a time-lapsed video of The Crew showed how players can take a road trip from Miami to Los Angeles. The in-game map isn’t to scale, but missions can sometimes take up to two hours to complete.
The Crew is also going to get an open beta starting on July 23 on PC, and it will officially launch on Nov. 11 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
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Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Like The Crew and The Division, Assassin’s Creed is getting a strong focus on online multiplayer. Players can work together to play through a mode in Unity, but gamers will also get an in-depth single-player experience. The game explores the French Revolution, and — in an onstage gameplay demo — Ubisoft showed off how the power of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One systems enable it to render hundreds of characters onscreen at the same time as well as present the French capital in stunning detail.
While in the single-player mode, players can also join multiplayer missions on the fly, which is similar to how the system works in Ubisoft’s recently released open-world hacking game Watch Dogs.
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Shape Up
Ubisoft is promising a new era of fitness games with its new motion-controlled exercising release Shape Up. The game combines Kinect with bright colorful minigames that will get you moving while having fun. Ubisoft emphasized how it is a game. You can even play against yourself in a mode where the game show a ghost version of yourself from earlier workouts.
This fitness game also doesn’t look like your standard exercise game. It has lots of feedback popping up onscreen with 8-bit animations and cartoon creatures and environments.
Shape Up is due out this November.
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Valiant Hearts: The Great War
The studio responsible for Rayman is taking a look back to World War I with an adventure game that explores the first World War. It looks like an animated film and focuses on telling a story.
Rainbow Six: Siege
Ubisoft’s tactical shooter is back, and this time it will have players working together online to either rescue hostages from the bad dudes or to keep the hostage away from the SWAT forces. Featuring destructible environments and a bunch of booby traps, gamers will take have one life per round to do some damage.
The shooter is due out in 2015. Read our preview here.
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